I am surprised that age restrictions are so stringent in China. In Canada children can legally work at 12 in many provinces and some work who are younger for actual companies and agencies in year round positions.

They must also go to school of course.

Not sure if this is good or bad as I have known some straight A students who have worked more than 20 hours a week year round and it seems to be by choice, not necessity.

National Labour laws are pretty strong in Canada but illegal practices are still common enough that it can take months to process a claim for unpaid wages, and longer to collect them as it often has to go through the Supreme Court.

I feel that it is naive to think that child labourers, legal or not are never abused even in big companies with strong policies against such practices in any country.

Are there abuses? Of course there are. But no systemic abuses, most abuses will be due to the actions of supervisors, going to far when they push people. The systemic abuse still happens in smaller factories making very cheap products or producing for the local markets.

As for child labor. The minimum age is 16. All factories producing OEM products for big foreign customers are under strict supervision far exceeding any government regulation (not necessarily out of the good of their hearts but to avoid bad publicity). Everything is strictly controlled, overtime, safety, working and living conditions. I have seen factories getting fined ridiculous amounts ($100,000.- for about 10 guys working for 2 hours beyond the stipulated maximum 60 weekly hours --- 40+ over time --- to finish packing items for an urgent order). There is every incentive to stick to the rules.

And there is no incentive at all to hire underage workers in a factory. This is not the age of Charles Dickens, you can't pay them less than minimum wage and fire all the adults, so why even go there? Why take the enormous risks? You will be fined heavily, you open yourself up for extortion (people will demand money from you or they will expose the fact that you are using underage labor), and your customers will run away if they find out?

And for workers it is a sellers market, one factory tries to pay too little you just take a short walk down the road to the next factory gate where they are urgently looking for workers.

Again, you will find underage workers, but in restaurants, gas stations, etc. Very small, locally owned factories whose owners have cozy relationships with the local authorities. A large factory would have to be really stupid to hire them. The only way it can happen is if they are being deceived by a fake ID.

The only way it can happen is if they are being deceived by a fake ID.

Aren't the ones who provide the fake IDs the biggest problem? From the same report that I mentioned before:

Quote:

When hiring student workers, HEG did not sign labor contracts with them. Student workers said that the company only signed the contracts with teachers and did not check the students’ IDs upon employment. All of the copies of IDs, falsified IDs, or household registers of the child labors were provided by the teachers. The teachers were in charge of organizing all of the affairs of student workers. For the two or three months of internship, the teachers would only pay students after they finished work and returned to school.

Ultimately it all becomes a "He started it!" problem. Google have recently sued Apple to ban sales of basically all Apple products. There are no current Apple vs Google lawsuits, so in that sense Google "started it", but it would be reasonable to see Google suing Apple as a natural extension of the Apple vs HTC suits, which Google has been involved in behind the scenes.

In recent years Apple has definitely been very litigious, more so than other companies. I think that is partly a deliberate company decision to try to clear entire product ranges for themselves, whether through 'genuine' patent protection or simply by making companies too afraid to get close to their designs, and partly because they are currently the leaders, and it is the leaders who tend to get copied.

Nokia, having totally failed to transition to smartphones, now seems to be entering the patent-litigation business instead. RIM and Motorola sue each other. It is endemic to the mobile industry. I suspect that if you plotted all the major players on a graph, with lines connecting those who had sued each other, there would be very few lines missing.[0] Then there are the pure patent companies who sue all of them.

I think the trivial level of innovation that is required to be granted a software patent mean that it is literally impossible to build something as complex as a modern smartphone or tablet without it infringing multiple patents. (From one report I read, there are over 4000 patents considered essential to the 4G system.)
But that is a "don't hate the player, hate the game" issue. The patent system is just broken. The only non mutally-assured-destruction way out seems to be for all the major players to cross-license their patents (as has been happening in pairs, for example Microsoft and Apple), but in the end that hurts consumers, as it raises huge barriers to entry for any new competitors, who are locked out of all those agreements. I think one of the reasons for Google acquiring so many patents it so that they can bring enough value to the table to be included in cross-licensing agreements.

What then, does Woz think of the Android - iOS patent battle, which include not just the Samsung - Apple global war, but others as well?

He hates it.

“I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it -- very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.”